The Impact of Leader Humor on Creativity

Abstract

As the construction industry faces several human resource challenges, leaders need to maintain a positive working ethos to cope with the creative challenges. This study examined the direct and indirect impact of leader humor on team creativity and employee creativity. We draw on Benign Violation Theory to hypothesize that the display of leader humor signals the acceptability of norm violations in the team, hence facilitating employee creativity and team creativity. Further, we integrate Benign Violation Theory with Social Learning Theory to propose that leader humor while signaling norm violation enables the team's learning orientation, influencing team creativity and employee creativity. We use multi-level modeling and ordinary least squares regression to examine data gathered from 165 team members nested with 45 construction projects in China. The results show that leader humor has a dual positive direct effect on team creativity and employee creativity. Furthermore, the direct effects are partially mediated by team learning orientation. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our study.